children at one time and so you can imagine if you're subject, japan benjamin franklin in colonial boston, you can imagine what that might have been like. when i was writing about franklinite realize a large part of the story was going to consist of franklin growing old because he became america's emissary to france during the american revolution at the age of 70. i started writing about franklin when i was around 40 and i really wondered whether i was going to be able to understand what it was like to grow old and infirm which was a large part of a franklin story. partly for this reason, i decided, and this is carried through in my other book, i decided to tell my stories, i try to relate the lives of my characters as much as possible through the perceptions, the words of people who knew them. my books tend to have more eyewitness stuff than some others. if i have a choice between writing a scene in my own words and writing a scene in the words of somebody who was mayor, i will tend toward the person who was there. that conveys a certain authenticity and it relieves me of the burden real